THE LAST FILM

Since its release in late 2006, Nouri Bouzid’s Akher film (which literally means “The Last Film”), has received broad acclaim in the Arab world, Africa, Europe and North America. After winning the Tanit d'or (Gold Tanit) in the 2006 Carthage Film Festival, it went on to take the Best Screenplay Award in the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, and more recently, the Ibn Rushd Prize. The latter is named after the Andalusian Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd or Averroës, and is awarded annually by the Germany-based Ibn Rushd Fund for Freedom of Thought.

Insofar as the 2007 Ibn Rushd Prize was to be awarded to a filmmaker whose work promotes freedom and democracy, and tackles the problem of social and political taboos from a fresh perspective, there cannot be a more deserving candidate than Tunisia’s versatile and veteran filmmaker, Nouri Bouzid. Perhaps, because of his firsthand experience of prison and torture for five years under the ancien régime of Habib Bourguiba, Nouri Bouzid’s cinematographic passion has centered on staging defeated and broken individuals in search of human dignity, societal justice and political reckoning. For example, in his 1986 début feature film Rih essed (a.k.a Man of Ashes), he tackles the issue of child molestation; the way a sexually abused apprentice carpenter grows into adulthood stigmatized by the scandal of homosexuality and the claim of lack of manhood, which prompts him, at the end, to avenge himself against his molester, the boss carpenter.

Similarly, Akher film chronicles the fate of another defeated and broken individual (a street break-dancer and a crook), whose pursuit of an illegal passage to Europe turns into a misguided quest for paradise and martyrdom. This story is set at a time when the 2003 British and US-led military campaign against Iraq—which ignited feelings of shame, humiliation, and anger throughout the Arab world—was well under way. The disoriented 25-year-old Bahta (Lotfi Abdelli) falls into the hands of a clandestine fundamentalist faction, and is gradually indoctrinated into believing that the best thing he could do with his life is literally blow it up for the sake of a guaranteed paradise and dozens of voluptuously beautiful houris, or young women.

Perhaps, the brainwashing scenes are the least convincing part of the film; they might mislead some people into thinking that Bouzid is, indeed, playing into the hands of US foreign policymakers and corrupt Arab regimes. But while the brainwashing scenes might unduly foreground religious fundamentalism as the root cause of Bahta’s radicalization, the scenes do not appropriate our attention away from the gamut of factors presented in the film: familial (abusive father); personal (betrayal and abortive romance); educational (no degree); economic (unemployment); social (poverty); civic (constantly chased by state police); psychological (shame and disgruntlement) and international pressure (the American invasion of Iraq and the clampdown on illegal immigration to Europe), amongst others. All these elements combined contribute to the making of a terrorist. Religious indoctrination by itself is an insufficient tool. For instance, when Bahta turns out to be too careless and slippery for the underground fundamentalist group, they decide to lock him up in a deserted wine factory. When he finds his way out of his captivity, Bahta punishes one member of the group. Thereafter he is chased by the police and runs to a nearby port, where he detonates himself in a metal container on which the word CAPITAL is written in block letters, thus implying that global capitalism is to blame for the emergence of the Kamikaze mentality in Arab youth culture.

Be that as it may, for Nouri Bouzid, Islam ought to be kept apart from any form of ideological or political struggle; be it against US imperialism or Israeli occupation. Akher film hammers this point home through a thoughtful sequence of interruptions whereby Bouzid intervenes in his own film to convince the mortified lead actor, Lotfi Abdelli, about the good intentions behind the film—that far from waging a campaign against Islam, a religion he loves, it unmasks the hypocrisy of fundamentalist groups in which Islam is exploited to advance various political agendas.

Thus, Akher film becomes as much a film about the making of a Kamikaze as a film about the making of a film about the making of a Kamikaze. While these meta-filmic scenes might awake spectators to the fictional nature of the film—and allow the director to anticipate and respond to the criticisms of his detractors—they paradoxically threaten the credulity of the film, which hinges on the fictional relation and willing suspension of disbelief. The point that the film makes is that truth itself might not be obtainable if it can no longer be discernible through the visual or fictional.